The Beatin' Path
by FountainPenguin
Summary: Have you ever tried just listening? Sometimes, words are unnecessary. And not everybody understands that. If following his elimination from Pahkitew Island, Beardo is going to be stuck a few weeks on a houseboat with a whole bunch of teenagers who are outgoing, talkative, rude, or just plain weird, whatever is a shy boy with a mimicry gift to do? (Written March 2015 - Ongoing)


His sloppy suspenders and blue jeans had been ripped off completely when he'd (quite literally, really) cannonballed into the salty water, but he figured that was the least of his worries. The wolf pups looked even more aggressive than the baby bear's mother and the crocodile combined.

Rewind:

His name was Emile Ernest Cherry, this teenage boy - "Beardo", and all three syllables of it if you wanted to earn his tentative, comfortable respect - and a year from now that name would be zipped from east coast to west along with him in a fierce tug o' war for his voice talents and his skills at spinning a pair of black discs at mixed animal-human raves with the music thumping in his ears. And today alone, he'd already survived a zeppelin crash, a face-first plummet into the shallows from 32,000 feet up, a moose stampede, a tower collapse, a session of ridicule behind his back, and a hot blast out of a cannon which more likely than not had been punched from a discontinued circus that hadn't kept its equipment up to date on regulations. All without a word of complaint, thank you very much. On top of all that, the bulging, gray-bellied clouds in the distance looked ready to burst.

Not that the wild animals _didn't_ unnerve him. Simply, Beardo didn't realize they were there until he'd already flailed to the pebbly beach and dragged himself up the scruffy sand. As he shook his head, flinging droplets from his afro and goatee, the sound of a snarl made him glance up with a quirked right eyebrow.

They were timberwolves, the pups. Cubs. Pups. Prick-eared and bushy-tailed, amber eyes alight and practically glowing. A lazy crocodile curled among a few of the larger rocks further up the beach, so green that it was nearly gray and invisible, especially when caught in the dark like this. Near the edge of the treeline hovered one mother bear and, nearby, one chubby cub with wet sand clinging to its fur. As Beardo studied them, his eyebrow lifting higher and higher, the wolves barked amongst themselves and bounded towards him on clumsy paws.

Animal attacks were a problem that was easily solved. After clearing his throat in his fist, Beardo opened his mouth and let out a series of chittering, huffing noises- the closest to a wolf that he could manage, just going purely off of memory. He must have done well enough. As his imitation drew on, the pups drew up and cocked their heads. One sat down and yawned.

Didn't stop the bears, though. Beardo backed hand over hand away from the frolicking cub, but it kept pursuing him across the beach, its tongue poking from its snout. The thing clearly knew a thing or two about humans, or thought it did. He'd watched all four previous seasons of Total Drama twice over, and he had a fair guess why. As part of the bears' contracts, they got food. Evidently, food came by way of handouts, and mama didn't want her kid taking candy from strangers.

Beardo skirted back towards the water, giving the sleepy crocodile plenty of room to crocodile around. After two coughs, he was ready for another go.

" _Rarrgh_ _rallagh-rey_. _Grrawla_."

With his deliberate inflection, that meant 'Leave me alone, please, I'm only passing through.' in Bear (Well, Ursa). Or, hopefully it did. Beardo came from what he liked to think was one of the more accepting small towns in Canada, where animals and humans got along fairly well. Heck- a flock of geese ran the local market, and one of the assistant librarians was a raccoon. That's where he'd rented the English-Bear dictionary. Not a lot of his people - humans, unfortunately - liked to bother with anything more than a rough pidgin language dripping with tells of ' _I really don't think you're smart enough to process this anyway_ ', but Beardo liked animals. Animals weren't used to being met halfway in conversation, so they always seemed to look upon him favorably when he came in with his careful, inoffensive noises. They were less prone to judging him.

But it didn't work. The mother bear flattened her ears and growled some phrase that Beardo didn't recognize a single syllable of. Then she lumbered forward. To make matters worse, lightning flickered over the trees and, in the distance, it began to rain.

Beardo couldn't help but widen his eyes as he continued to scramble away. It didn't work. His attempt at communication didn't _work_. That didn't make sense. It always worked! Something was off. It couldn't be him, surely? The bears that lingered in the surrounding forest back home always responded and politely retreated to a safe distance before either vocalizing again and waiting patiently as he shuffled through the translation book, or abandoning him altogether. But her dialect was sharp and unfamiliar. Neither northern nor lowlands nor eastern. It was completely unique. This- this wasn't right at all!

The wolves had gotten restless. They studied Beardo unhappily. One of the larger ones bounced forward, scuffing up the sand. Beardo wasn't nearly the animal expert he hoped to be someday, but those were _not_ wolf prints its paws left behind. They were hard circles, with saw-teeth all the way around the rims. Like gears. It tossed its head when Beardo tried a few Lupus phrases, like it vaguely recognized the tone of his voice but didn't care for listening to instructions. Curiosity began to shift into aggression as it drew back its lips.

Well. Beardo's fingers closed around a jagged pebble that slid snugly into his hand. Craning back his arm, he hurled it at the oncoming wolf. He really hadn't meant to hit it - just land it nearby - but the pebble skipped off the other rocks and clipped the wolf on the underside of its snout with a resounding _clang!_

Um. Okay.

He checked the trees over from where he crouched. This wasn't fair. Wolves couldn't climb, but bears could. And any hole in the ground large enough for him to squeeze into would definitely fit two or three of the wolf pups, even if it kept the bears at bay.

With a snarl, the wolf leapt forward. A flick of its tail summoned the others after it. Beardo abandoned the crab-crawl idea and booked it down the shore. Sure, he wasn't the best swimmer among his three brothers, but with his head start, he was confident he could outlast the puppies, and Mother wasn't likely to leave her cub.

While he ran, he glanced a little to his left and, surprises of surprises, spotted a dark shape bobbing in the water. It was a boat. It was a big boat (Okay, amendment: Obviously it was in the water- where else should it be?) Beardo scratched his goatee and lifted his eyebrows. The chunky thing looked something like a houseboat and something like a legitimate battleship.

He couldn't very well barge into the boat. There was no way it would have been left abandoned, so there had to be people in there. Instead, he plowed through the water, swinging his arms and kicking up a hurricane. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke. More like, he'd get a stroke if he had to exercise like this much longer.

The lead wolf crashed chest-first into the waves. The first surge doused it from ears to tail. Beardo double-taked (double-took?) back over his shoulder when he heard its warbled, drawn-out cry, like the needle on a gramophone scratching over glass. Sparks flew from its jaws. Could it breathe fire? He didn't have the chance to test his theory, because the beast's eyes lost their glow, and it went limp in the water. The other pups retreated, yipping, all the way up the beach, past the horrified bears, and into the trees. Even the crocodile lurched to its feet and wandered after them.

Sure. Why not?

Beardo floated uncertainly for several more seconds, then called out to the creature. It didn't respond. He paddled back as quickly as he could manage, and found the thing beached in the shallows with the water dragging at its fur. His jeans had been swept in beside it. With careful slowness, he pulled them on again and chirped to the wolf, multiple times, but something like a quarter of an hour flickered by and it obviously wasn't going to move.

Frowning, Beardo pressed his fingertips to its muzzle. It was cold to the touch. Cold and… very solid. Very hard.

He knocked with a knuckle. _Clang. Clang. Clang._

"It's a… robot."

And it was. Baffled, Beardo could only stare at it. When he'd regained himself after a few moments, he swept its soft gray fur first to the left, then the other side, checking all over its body, but _it was a robot._ Were all the animals on this island robots? How large _was_ the Total Drama budget? On the zeppelin, Topher had made some sort of comment about how several other reality shows like Rebuild Rampage, Doctor For a Day, Sibling Swap, and Ridonculous Race pulled together only half as much between them, although Beardo had tuned out the reason why that was. Backstabbing teenagers, evidently, ruled the world of entertainment with golden thumbs. And Chris _had_ been able to afford this island.

Silent now, he slid one arm beneath the mechanical wolf's head and the other beneath its rear. It was heavy. Heavier than he thought it should have been, for something so small, even if it was a robot. It didn't so much as twitch. The water had, evidently, short-circuited its entire system. He found himself laughing at it.

Beardo boosted it behind his neck so its forelegs dangled against his right shoulder and its hind legs over his left. In this way, he started into the woods. He didn't even bother to say the place was his.

The weird thing about the island was, its environment made no sense. First, Beardo stumbled through a jungle. A jungle. A jungle on an island off the coast of British Columbia. A jungle directly bordering the beach. A jungle thick with vines that criss-crossed through the trees and dripped like syrup.

It was in the jungle that Beardo found peat soft enough to dig a hole, near two tall boulders. It had to be a shallow hole, because too soon his fingers hit solid earth, and try as he might to scratch, he couldn't break through it. The rock was wide and unbroken.

He slipped the wolf into the hole and scraped the dirt back over its mechanical, animalistic face. A robotic body blanketed in a soft pelt. Gear-shaped pawprints melded to a body that traveled in a pack and loped in a wolf-like way, even on its stiff joints.

After that, Beardo set off again. There had been a five-star resort and hotel ready to welcome the contestants of Seasons 1 to 3. He just had to find it. He didn't have a particular direction to start in, so much as a direction _not_ to. The rain continued to patter down in the northeast, so he stuck to the southwest quadrant. He passed a grove of palms sprouting from the sand and bleeding coconuts, a slope sculpted entirely of rocks in beautiful red-browns and blue-grays, a miniature freshwater lake with an underwater tunnel he could see only when he squinted, and a clump of almond trees surrounded by small monkeys whose movements were too fine and accurate to be robots. Beardo was able to interpret a few of their slower and lower-pitched, "Hey, hey, that guy has big hair"s and "Fuzzy face"s and "Want to touch"s, but it had been too long since he'd practiced his Simian, and monkeys were infamous for messing around with humans and playing dumb anyway.

All things considered, it really didn't take him long to run across the wreckage left over from the zeppelin crash. The blimp, once so magnificent, sprawled on its bruised side in a clearing, surrounded by collapsed trees. Soot lay dashed across the dirt in spirals. For three minutes Beardo studied it, circling it, hands clasped behind his back. Then the rain began dribbling down, and he found himself edging closer and closer to the zeppelin with each loop.

Noises echoed from inside the hull. Skittering noises. Beardo approached on weary feet. What were they? Rat? Rabbit? Oppossum? Wolf?

A square of light evaporated the darkness in a line, but shadows clung like cobwebs to the corners. All the crates had slid to the opposite end of the hold and piled up on what had once been the wall. Beardo put his foot through, but stiffened at the sound of chittering. Slowly, his eyes rotated up.

Incorrectly, Beardo had assumed that if he heard scratching noises, they were footsteps and the creatures occupying the zeppelin wreckage would be grounded. He hadn't anticipated bats. Bats were impossible to communicate with if one couldn't hit their high frequency. They were swift and quiet. They could chase you through the woods no matter where you ran or how dark it was. They ate insects with their feet. They stared down like stalactites with bitter faces, smashed noses, and dripping fangs. If they were on Chris's island, they were doubtless either robots with laser vision or just plain aggressive in general on top of their natural tendency for evil.

While we were making a list, they had high potential of snagging in his afro with their little toes, and he wasn't entirely confident he could manage to claw them out without having his arm ripped apart by the swarm.

Nope! Nope! Nope! Beardo backed out into the rain and sat down. No chance of retrieving his duffel. Not tonight. Licking his lips, he wandered away.

He was more successful in scaring off the foxes that had dug themselves a den in the side of a rise in the oak and maple and palm tree forest. Beardo crouched down, raised one hand to his mouth, and let out the most ferocious lion roar he'd made for two years. As expected, he heard them scuffling and yipping out the back entrance some ways off. He had to chuckle at that. Robotic they may be, but they were clearly animal at heart.

He slept the night there with his arms and hair as a pillow and in the morning set off wandering again in search of food. Not that he was the most wilderness-savvy city kid, but maybe he could ask some of the animals what they'd suggest for breakfast. He'd meant to head north, which he thought was the opposite direction of the zeppelin, but when he ran across it, he had to stop and scratch his hair. What he really needed was a map of some sort.

He took a crumpled sheet of lined paper from his pocket (it was half-dissolved from its excursion in the ocean) and flipped it over to the side not covered in rhyming words and question marks. He scribbled in loopy slashes to represent the water and the beach, a large square for the dinky, misshapen battleship - he named it 'boat' - triangles for the campground area where he'd been fired from the Cannon of Shame, and an oval for the zeppelin wreckage complete with flames and smoke. After some consideration, he added a stick wolf to mark the gravesite of the little robot. And… that was in. Those were the only landmarks he knew so far.

So, with nothing better to do, and since he was still on the lookout for this season's Playa Des Losers location anyway, he shrugged and began his walk again. He passed animals, most of whom were likely mechanical because they responded to his noises, but with looks on their faces that suggested they were just confused to find him in their territory. For the most part, they either left him alone of their own will or Beardo managed to scare them off when they bristled and approached. Any time he crossed a significant boulder heap or a waterfall that trailed into a creek, he penciled it in. After seven hours of this he had a completed map of the entire island south of the camp, and Beardo found himself with an itching stomach, a dry tongue, and completely at a loss in general.

There was no Playa Des Losers on this island. Chris had abandoned him to the elements.

He stayed at a loss for another four hours as sunset came and went, but just as he lowered his hands to take another sip of water from one of the streams, he heard a desperate holler sailing through the air.

The Cannon had fired its latest victim.

No time to waste. While the sound still hung in the sky, Beardo abandoned his drink and took off in pursuit of it. Almost certainly it had been heading for the same beach where he had landed. But when he pulled up short on the sand, puffing, there was no sign of an eliminated contestant. No footprints. No twisted bodies. No bones, even.

"I am _this_ far from purchasing you all a dozen calendars, clingy cacao trees! Prepare yourself to rue today's date for the remainder of your existence, because I am about to make you regret your ancestors' germinations!"

It wasn't even a question who that was.

Beardo found himself chuckling as he retraced his steps into the jungle. It was the trail he found first; a wide assortment of random objects from decorative salt shakers to pens shaped like fluffy roosters to dice to silly straws to online printed certificates lay scattered in the dirt. The teenager in question had locked himself upside-down in a knot of vibrant vines. Beardo recognized him without struggle because he was, well… Leonard. Tall, lanky, dark-skinned, freckle-nosed sixteen-year-olds who dressed in full green robes and wore pointed hats and false gray bears weren't easy to forget about.

Okay, so the hood-like hat had tumbled off to reveal scruffy brown hair and a thick cowlick, and he stunk like a wet ferret, but other than that, Leonard hadn't changed a scrap since yesterday. Beardo had noticed that they were about the same height back at the elimination ceremony, but the wannabe wizard was scrawnier and obviously much lighter. Apparently, he had overshot the landing in the water. At least he hadn't plowed face-first into the sand.

"-thinks he can just waltz around disbelieving in magic and screwing with the abilities of perfectly happy channelers minding their own business. I ought to give him two scaldflare blasts up his- Oh!" When Leonard saw him gawking below, he tightened his lips in a slimy smile and fluttered several of the fingers on his left hand. "No need to strain yourself in getting me down, friend. I can get out of this."

He was that confident, was he?

"You're Beardo, right?"

Beardo tried to decide if he wanted to tell Leonard his name was actually pronounced Be-air-doh, three syllables. He didn't.

Leonard continued his kicking and squirming routine for another five minutes more, sending a shower of toy lizards and cap erasers and slinkies to the earth every time he shook his sleeves. When he next began to speak, Beardo assumed he was about to ask for help. Instead he said, "Presto! There's my wand! I knew it was in here somewhere." He twisted his head back so the top curve of his hair nearly lined up with Beardo's. "I'm going to burn off these vines using a sunspark spell, and since it falls under the Light family classification, you could risk temporary blindness and possibly some sort of cancer. Cover your eyes until it's done. You see that leather book with the green cover? The upside-down one with its pages spread? Yeah, that one there by your left foot. Of course, I meant right foot. Yes, that's Volume II of The Essential Side Effects Manual if you want all the details on that. I think it's page thirty-seven."

Beardo didn't pick up the book, and instead shuffled backwards as Leonard lashed his wand through the air. He wasn't surprised in the least when nothing happened. But, Leonard was trying his best, and he brimmed with hope so pure that it felt like a physical blanket. Crushing him now would be akin to telling a small child that the Tooth Fairy had been fried in the neighbors' bug zapper.

So, once Leonard had covered his face and finished his incantation, Beardo began a low hum like the crackling of a campfire. It arced upwards. And expanded. Like a pregnant balloon. Leonard sucked a gasp through the space between his front teeth, but didn't remove his palm from his eyes. As Beardo continued to hum, he reached out and tugged the vines. Lower. Lower. Doing the best that he could without brushing his hands against the upside-down Leonard, he untangled the worst of the knots.

"It stopped. Did it stop? Can I look now?"

Beardo made a confirming _Ding ding!_ sound. Leonard removed his fingers from his face. Both hands braced themselves against the ground and he shook off the last loops of jungle plants and _flump_ ed to the dirt. In silence, Beardo watched as the other teen picked himself and his hood up and dusted off the area beneath his robes that presumably covered his knees. Stuffing the hat back on his head and fluffing its point, he said brightly, "And not so much as a scratch on me. Marvelous as it gets!"

Nod. Smile: tight-lipped.

Leonard studied him up and down, then leaned his head towards his right shoulder. "Ah, that's right- you don't talk much. Alright, that's cool. I hope you don't mind if I keep talking to you anyway. I always have about a dozen kids running around my house twenty hours a day, and I'll go nuts if it's too silent here. Well, if you do want to say anything, just let me know and I'll listen. You're I think the only one I've ever met who matches my high eye level exactly, so if we do ever sit and hold conversation, this will be fun. The name's Leonard, if you forgot that- Leonard Moore."

Hilarious as it was that Leonard thought he would actually need to reintroduce himself, Beardo grimaced. Leonard didn't rhyme with anything. Maybe 'feathered'.

"So?" Leonard glanced around the surrounding woods, his excitement growing with each passing heartbeat. He even clapped his hands. With his gap-toothed grin showing, he looked about to squeal. "You, me, the forest, an adventure waiting to happen. Where shall we quest off to first?"

Beardo removed the makeshift map from his overalls pocket, unfolded it, and handed it to Leonard. Leonard rotated until the 'east' label on the map's compass rose lined up with the rising of the moon. After tracing his spidery finger up and down the paper, he paused on the left side.

"Did you make this, Beardo? That's magnificent. So, you found the zeppelin crash? Can we go there? Perhaps some of my potions survived the impact. Let's go there."

Again? Beardo imitated the shrieking sounds of bats and their fluttery wings, but all that earned was another up and down scan from Leonard, and a crease across the young wizard's forehead that suggested he might be having second thoughts about friendship.

Well. If Leonard wanted to investigate the wreckage and face down those creepy little bloodsuckers, then who was he to object?


End file.
